


It Don't Mean a Thing

by Wisteria_Leigh



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Abuse, Alternate Universe - 1940s, Alternate Universe - World War II, Because who doesn't love serious sexual tension while blues dancing, Child Abuse, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff and Angst, I'm learning more about the 1940s writing this fic than I did in school, Implied Antisemitism, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, M/M, Sexual Content, Swing Dancing, a hilarious patchwork of canonical events dressed up in saddle shoes and hair rolls, a lot of 1940s slang, if half the words aren't italicized did I even write it?, nazi punching included
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-09-05
Updated: 2020-01-02
Packaged: 2020-10-01 17:57:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 17,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20358211
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wisteria_Leigh/pseuds/Wisteria_Leigh
Summary: Since Ronan consistently failed to prioritize attending class, he’d only ever seen the infamous Parrish in passing. Always polished. Always groomed. Always looking like the weight of the world plus four planets rested on his bony shoulders.He’d certainly never seen him like this: flushed and glowing with sweat as the bass drum thud-thu-thudded under the trumpets screaming and the trombones swinging and the clarinet bumping both out of the way to solo again and again and again. Propriety tossed aside with his suit jacket and waistcoat, sleeves of his collared shirt rolled up with the top buttons undone and his tie loose and fluttering with every aerial and twist.This Adam Parrish was…unbearable.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Welcome to the 1940s swing dancing AU I wanted to read so therefore am writing it. If you squint hard enough, and if the light is hitting it juuuust right, you can see a vague outline of the spectacular 1993 film SWING KIDS. Except...they're in the states. And there's no traumatic scene with a broken record and a bathtub. And Christian Bale is not in a starring role. 
> 
> I've never posted a fic without it being 100% completed, so this is going to be an adventure for all of us!! Posting schedule? I don't know her. Consider it a delightful surprise when this bobs back to the top of the feed. 
> 
> Also, all songs used as inspiration, whether named in-text or not, will be linked to in the end notes of each chapter so you can feel the swing.

Ronan Lynch agreed to join Gansey at the Henrietta Dance Hall for two reasons, and two reasons only: 

First: Gansey’s fatherly concern about Ronan’s disreputable social life was starting to tip the delicately balanced scales of “endearing” and “annoying” into  _ in-fucking-furiating  _ territory. 

Second: their shithole apartment was out of whiskey. 

As a general rule, Ronan hated anything involving large crowds of happy people, upbeat music, and liquor he had to pay for. Which were, of course, the three things that made the dance hall a  _ dance hall _ . 

But once a month he tugged on a black vest and laced up his oxfords and knotted his tie with as much finesse as an infant without opposable thumbs, and let Gansey drag him to whatever miserable social gathering the Good Old Boys of Aglionby College had planned. 

“Come on, old sport,” Gansey had said as Ronan dragged his feet out the door. “It’ll be fun! The boys aren’t so bad, if you’d give them the time of day.” 

Ronan sighed dramatically as Gansey locked the apartment door, and said, “and soil my well-cultivated reputation? Fat fucking chance.” 

Gansey looked at him from over the wire rim of his spectacles. “Your ‘reputation’ is that you eat babies and take tea with Satan every Sunday.” 

Ronan opened his hands and raised a brow.  _ Exactly,  _ the gestured said. 

Gansey sighed fatalistically, and nudged Ronan’s shoulder towards the staircase. Spring hadn’t quite settled in the Shenandoah Valley, the evening air and eastward winds threatening to leave frost on their fingertips as they pushed out of Monmouth Manufacturing and hurried along. Gansey noted Ronan should have brought a coat. Ronan noted Gansey could “go fuck himself.” 

The Henrietta Dance Hall bookended the west side of Main Street, only a few blocks from the converted factory Gansey and Ronan and their third roommate, Noah, had chosen over the college dormitories. Most of the small town mom-and-pop shops closed at five o’clock sharp, but the dance hall shone like a beacon through the night. It was an old colonial-style building - two stories, red brick, white columns and big hanging lanterns - with some history that Gansey could recite like a walking town annal and that Ronan couldn’t care less about. Unsophisticated Pavlovian conditioning: Gansey said “Did you know…” and Ronan’s attention immediately and unconsciously latched on to anything  _ but  _ Gansey’s impromptu history lecture. 

While the men of Aglionby certainly had their territories marked around town _ ,  _ the dance hall wasn’t one of them. It was the only club in town, and one of the only places in a thirty mile radius where both women  _ and  _ alcohol could be enjoyed in spring of 1943. And for some reason unbeknownst to Ronan, these women  _ wanted  _ to spend time with the wealthy WASPs who were either too rich or too smart or an unfortunate mixture of both to be sent off to war. 

Outside the hall, men smoked and chatted up their dance partners, using the brisk night to cool off before knocking back another gin fizz and bouncing back out to the floor. Gansey patted a few boys on the shoulder on the way through the big double doors. 

They heard the band before they saw it, echoing down the coat check corridor, never daring to dip below  _ forte _ . It was infectious. Gansey Charleston-ed down the hall more than he walked, nodding at the students he didn’t know, shaking the hands of those he did. A Gansey handshake was more valuable than a personal sitdown dinner at the supper club with FDR on the White House’s tab. Which was  _ ridiculous  _ given that Gansey would shake hands with anything that offered him a hand, paw, flipper, stub,  _ whatever.  _

_ President _ , they called him. “Which is, frankly, quite baffling,” Gansey once said, bemused. “I have no political aspirations, especially not during  _ this  _ time.” 

“Pretty sure that German fuckhead has enough political aspiration for the both of you,” Ronan replied. “If you consider world domination to be, y’know, political.” 

“I consider it frightening above all else.” 

They all knew better than to attempt pleasantries with Ronan Lynch. 

They stopped at the bar first, because Gansey had promised Ronan a drink. Whiskey on the rocks. He drank half before Gansey could hand the barman a tip. 

Finding Gansey’s pals in the crowded dance hall was easy. They always sat at the same table and were, from Ronan’s understanding, more interested in talking about boring shit like the  _ economy _ . Why they chose to have these  _ riveting  _ conversation here, where the music and the chatter and the clinking of glasses were so loud you could barely think straight, instead of somewhere else was beyond him. Ronan assumed that they cared far more about being  _ seen  _ as smart and aloof than they did about engaging a productive and intellectual discourse. Really, they just looked like assholes. 

Ronan threw himself into a chair and heaved his feet onto the white tablecloth, pushing the chair onto its hind legs. Before the Aglionby boys could sneer, Gansey shooed Ronan’s feet back to the floor. A footprint remained. 

The dance floor was full to bursting. A chaotic tangle of legs and arms and lifts and spins, captivating in its energy and dizzying to watch. Ladies twirling and whirling, skirts hiked up higher than heaven, twisting the balls of their feet into the ground as they skated across the polished wood. Gentlemen banging their heads up and down like men possessed, reaching for the floor then reaching for the sky, kicking their legs and spinning round and round with their partners, a crowd of whirling dervishes with devilish fervor and a sinful showing of skin. 

Shiny finger waves and hair rolls held, miraculously, with what was probably just cement disguised as hair product. Ronan asked Gansey once how it was possible to fuck a woman if her head would just be...propped up at a weird angle because her hair was so stiff, and Gansey had blushed furiously and stammered out a nonsensical string of vowels and syllables until he made up some excuse to suddenly and desperately need a cup of earl grey. Ronan still didn’t know. 

He wasn’t exactly chomping at the bit to find out. 

Another boy - John, maybe? Donald?  _ Ralph?  _ Who the fuck knows, or cares, honestly - flicked open a lighter, only for Ronan to snatch it and light his own smoke before tossing it, carelessly, into his empty glass. 

One of Gansey’s friends turned to the table. “Who’s that with Parrish?” 

Parrish. The name caught both Ronan’s and Gansey’s attentions. The man pointed out to the floor where, through a break in the tumultuous sea of dancers, they could see them.

Fair brown hair tousled by spins and dips and quick footwork, high cheekbones shining in electric glow of yellow lights, smile bright and easy as he pushed and pulled and spun the short girl around. His long fingers led her hand with practiced ease, holding tension while still careful and graceful. 

Parrish. Adam Parrish. University student. Acquaintance of Gansey. 

Correction: Gansey’s current obsession. Dick has been _fawning _over Parrish since the Boy Wonder himself happened upon Gansey and his broken down Ford Phaeton Roadster (lovingly named “the Pig”) on the side of a dirt road in bumfuck nowhere. Gansey told the story like he was recounting being visited by the ghost of King Arthur telling him the precise coordinates of the holy grail. 

The man just fixed his  _ alternator _ , for Christ’s sake. He wasn’t the second coming. Regardless, Gansey hadn’t shut his trap about him since. 

Since Ronan consistently failed to prioritize attending class, he’d only ever seen the infamous Parrish in passing, usually hunched over a too-large textbook at a desk in the library, or walking quickly across campus with his mouth drawn into a tight and serious line, or listening to Gansey talk his ear off about history or some other shit. Always polished. Always groomed. Always looking like the weight of the world plus four planets rested on his bony shoulders.

He’d certainly never seen him like  _ this _ : summer tanned skin flushed and glowing with sweat as the bass drum thud-thu-thudded under the trumpets screaming and the trombones swinging and the clarinet bumping both out of the way to solo again and again and again. Propriety tossed aside with his suit jacket and waistcoat, sleeves of his collared shirt rolled up with the top buttons undone and his tie loose and fluttering with every aerial and twist. 

_ This  _ Adam Parrish was… _ unbearable _ . 

Ronan pushed his chair further back, and sunk deeper into the shadows. Hoped the dark would hide the hot blush creeping up his neck every time Adam swung the petite girl between his legs and Ronan wished that were him instead. 

The song was long. Too long. Too damn long for Adam and this - this -  _ dame  _ to be spinning and dipping and flipping without a breather, but they didn’t stop. Adam was breathing heavily and his hair was practically dripping with sweat but his  _ eyes _ , those blue eyes - the color of a cloudless Virginian country sky - were bright and alert, full of energy, focused on every move, keeping the whirlwind of their dancing in perfect control with the tense curl of his fingers. 

Ronan took a long drag from his cigarette and downed the rest of his whiskey.

The song ended in a cacophonous chorus of brass and winds and cymbal. Adam placed a delicate touch to the small of his partner’s back, shifting his fingers to reel her in, holding her strong and steady as he dipped her, her saddle shoes pointed in the air and her spiky hair brushing the polished wood floor right as the conductor cut. 

Cheers and claps erupted, both for the band and the dancers who made it through the rigorous number. Adam righted the girl. They laughed together, flushed and breathless, clapping as well, but eyes only on each other. 

Gansey lowered himself into the seat beside Ronan, eyes wide, blush high on his cheeks. Shellshocked, almost. 

“The hell is wrong with you?” Ronan said, smacking Gansey’s bicep. Gansey didn’t even flinch. 

“Isn’t she a sight,” he sighed at last, chin in his hand like a swooning, lovesick cartoon. It took a moment for Ronan to understand. The girl. Parrish’s partner. She was wearing two skirts crudely stitched together, purple plaid and black and white floral, and a red button-up blouse, with red feathered clips above each ear, and  _ apparently  _ that was enough to send Gansey into a tizzy. Nauseating. Ronan grunted. He’d never seen a woman he thought was “a sight”, and that tiny little twerp was no exception. 

“I’m getting another drink,” Ronan snarled. Gansey was too busy calling Adam’s name to notice, or care. 

Dancers swarmed the bar as the band switched to a Blues tune, in desperate need of a refreshing sip of any liquor they could get for cheap. Ronan shouldered past them and glared at the barkeep until he took his order. 

“Already covered. Courtesy of the man at the end of the bar.”

Ronan knew before he saw him. Dark hair messily combed back. A cigarette dangling between thin lips. Limbs dripping off the edge of the bar as he leaned back to be certain Ronan would see him. 

Kavinsky. 

He smiled, a sharp and dangerous twist of his lips, and disappeared into the crowd. 

Ronan grabbed the barman’s arm. “Take it.” He thrust the money at him. “Vodka on the rocks.”

Joseph Kavinsky’s pack of rabid dogs were the sort of womanizing assholes that were easy to find: always lazing around a table along the darkest edge of the room, faces lit by the embers of cigarettes, glowing eyes staring out from the shadows, the sort that made the hairs on the back of your neck stand up. They were wolves hunting a flock of sheep. Marking which women were prettiest, which women were drunkest, which came with partners and which had come alone. 

Kavinsky, however...Kavinsky had the taste for a different sort of meat. 

He and Ronan had that in common, at least. 

He dropped the drink in front of the smoking, red-eyed Bulgarian. Kavinsky, to his credit, didn’t even seem surprised. He just threw his head back and barked a single “Ha!” and a mouthful of smoke into the molded ceiling tiles. 

“What do I owe the pleasure, Lynch?” he said. A snake in the Garden of Eden, words smooth and languid, persuasive enough that you could miss the venomous shape of its head if you weren’t careful. 

Ronan didn’t feel like being careful. 

“Not interested in being in debt to an asshole like you.”

Kavinsky smiled. His teeth were yellow. “You still owe me. Interest.” 

Ronan scoffed. “You opening a bank? Get the fuck outta here with that shit. ‘Interest’ my ass.”

“It’s how the American economy works, my boy.” Kavinsky angled an empty chair at Lynch with a kick. “I don’t make the rules.”

“Bullshit. You’re playing a whole different game.” 

Kavinsky took a long drag from his smoke. “Maybe so. But only because I know that the other game won’t get me what I want. You gonna sit or what? I’m running a business here, and you’re scaring the customers.” 

Ronan glared, but flung himself into the empty seat and bummed a light off of Skov. A twitchy young man scampered up to the table, stopped by Jiang with a hand to the chest. Words were exchanged, whispers beneath the music as the man shrunk under Jiang’s glare. He handed him money. Jiang slipped him a bag. 

Rumor had it that Kavinsky’s father was a bootlegger for the Bulgarian mafia during prohibition. That Kavinsky took over the business once Joe Senior met a grisly end at the hands of the Italians. Some said it was over territory, that the Bulgarians had set up shop in a part of Jersey run by the Italians. Others said it was over a girl. 

It was the quiet voices that whispered in the shadows in the dead of night who said it wasn’t over a speakeasy, or over a lady. That it wasn’t the Italians at all. K had done it, they said. K wanted a bigger piece of the pie. Figured slicing his pop right out of the picture with a steak knife to the throat and a .38 caliber revolver to the back of the skull would make him king. 

He was building a drug empire in Henrietta and living off his father’s fortune, so he wasn’t all wrong about that. 

Kavinsky inhaled the last inch of his cigarette and dropped the ashes into Ronan’s glass. “How does a man of God like yourself excuse a den of sin like this?” Kavinsky slurred. 

Ronan frowned. “I don’t.” 

“So when you go have your weekly chat with that priest downtown, you don’t bother mentioning--” he gestured to the club. The alcohol. The smoking. The women. The drugs. 

_ Forgive me, father, for I have sinned.  _ “I don’t lie, if that’s what your asking.”

“Ah, but an omission is still not a truth.” 

“The hell are you on about, K.” 

Kavinsky pointed his long fingers right between Ronan’s eyes. “You come in here, dragging your feet, like you’re above it all. Like this place might burn you alive. Let it go, Lynch, is all. Let  _ loose  _ for once. Take a hit. Snort a line.” He dragged his fingers down Ronan’s cheek. “Find a dark corner with some dame.” He grabbed onto Ronan’s jaw and yanked it closer. Licked his lips and hissed in his ear, “or some mack who’s good with his mouth--”

Ronan shoved him off with a curse. Kavinsky howled. Another customer speaking with Proko looked over nervously. 

Ronan dug a cigarette from the pack in his pocket and dropped it into Kavinsky’s glass. He shoved the chair back and threw the butt of the cig in his drink in Kavinsky’s face. 

“Where’re you goin, dollface?” Kavinsky grinned. 

“Paid my interest.” He pointed to the glass with his middle finger, then flicked it in Kavinsky’s face.

“See you on the streets, Lynch!” Kavinsky called after him. Ronan didn’t turn around. 

#####

Any amount of time spent with Kavinsky was too long. But for the first time in human history, he should have stuck around for just a little bit longer. 

Adam was still standing at the table, hand on the small of his spiky little partner’s back and holding her close. He was nodding at whatever Gansey was emphatically rambling about - probably  _ taxes  _ or some shit - still catching his breath and wiping sweat from his brow with his wrist. Ronan inhaled sharply and exhaled like a curse. He stormed back to the table. 

“Ronan! Where were you?” Gansey exclaimed. 

“Powdering my nose,” he growled,  _ glaring  _ a scotch-drinking, bowtie-wearing, snobby brat of a student out of his chair.

“You know Adam Parrish, right?” 

Ronan grunted. He threw himself into his chair. 

“We share a Latin seminar,” Adam noted. 

Of course they did.  _ Of fucking course.  _

“Although, can’t say I’ve seen Lynch occupying a desk more than once this semester.” 

“Ah, yes. Well, he does seem to have a bit of an allergy to academic establishments,” Gansey said. Adam raised a brow. 

“Listening to wrinkly professors lecture on shit for more than five minutes makes me break out in hives,” Ronan said. 

And Adam...smirked at him? Smiled, maybe? His mouth twitched before he schooled it back into submission. “You should see a doctor about that,” he said. 

“They told me it’s incurable.”

“Being an entitled asshole who pays to go to school and then doesn’t even bother showing up?” Adam remarked. “Seems like it.”

Ronan would have spit something out he regretted, had Gansey not suddenly exclaimed, “Oh, and this is Adam’s partner! Uh...Jane, was it?” 

“No. It was not,” the spiky girl ground between gritted teeth. “It was Blue.”

“Blue. Right. Such an - interesting name.” And it was clear he didn’t mean the good sort of  _ interesting.  _

“What the hell is  _ that  _ supposed to mean?” Blue,  _ not  _ Jane, snapped. 

“Well, it’s not a very common name, is it? Quite unusual. Does it mean anything?” 

“No. It’s just my name.” 

Adam looked increasingly uncomfortable. Good. He was easier to hate when he looked that way. 

“I’ve never met someone named for a color, have you? Has anyone?” Gansey asked the table, all of whom were very obviously trying to stay the hell out of the way of the eruption bubbling just beneath the surface of Blue’s steadily cracking courtesy. 

“So just because my name doesn’t  _ fit  _ your standard of  _ normal,  _ that means it’s gotta stand for something? Maybe my mom just liked the color!”

“Well then that would mean something, wouldn’t it?”

“Uh,” Adam said, taking a step toward the dance floor and trying, very gently, to lead Blue that way, too. “Maybe we should--”

“What about  _ your  _ name, huh? ‘Campbell’? What’s  _ that  _ supposed to mean? That your mom ate some chicken noodle soup before she pushed you out?” 

Gansey’s cheeks turned a brilliant shade of red. “All I meant was that Blue is so out of the ordinary, that a simpler name would be much easier for me to remember--”

“So my name isn’t  _ good enough  _ for you to remember?” Blue threw her head back and laughed. “Is this what you do? Just… just  _ rename  _ people when you meet them like some sort of, of, of gatekeeper? Who the hell do you think you are?!”

Adam obviously wanted to sink into the floor. He took Blue’s arm - who was still going on, and on, and on - and steered back towards the floor. “Be seeing you,” he said with a small wave. Blue flipped Gansey the bird as she dragged Adam behind her. 

“That went great, man. Nice work,” Ronan said. 

Gansey looked to the ceiling for strength, and found none. He sagged into a seat and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “I’m a fool,” he muttered. 

“Yes. But, you’re  _ my  _ fool.”

Gansey gave him a tired smile. “I think you’ve met your quota for socializing. Shall we head home?” 

“Thank  _ fuck _ , thought you’d never ask.”

Gansey bade his friends farewell. Ronan snuck a peek at the dance floor one last time. Adam and Blue danced, still, but Blue’s scowl was visible from a mile away, and Adam…

Adam was already looking back. 

######

They called Aglionby College “The Ivy of the South.” Famous for its rigorous academics, all-star athletics, and, of course, its legacy students. 74% of Aglionby men had a grandfather, or a father, or a brother, or an uncle who had gone their first. The other 26% of students were high school valedictorians, state champion athletes, and/or those without a legacy, but enough fortune to build one. 

Richard Campbell Gansey III fell into the latter category. His father had pushed Harvard, his mother Yale, but Gansey had his heart set on Aglionby. For the history. For the location. For the presence of one visiting professor, a Richard Malory from the University of Sussex. He had the grades, of course, and the unquenchable thirst for knowledge, but it was no coincidence that his acceptance letter arrived in the days following a substantial donation to the restoration of Aglionby’s world-renowned classics collection made by none other than Senator Richard Gansey II. 

Ronan Lynch had mediocre grades and no motivation, but he was filthy rich and a legacy. His brother was an Aglionby man, and it was no coincidence that a large donation to the tennis team on behalf of Niall Lynch’s estate was finalized two hours before the administration’s decision to accept Ronan. 

Ronan and Gansey went to the same boarding school as teenagers, roomed together for the final two years; while Ronan did spend his weekends at his family estate thirty minutes down the road, they saw no reason to fix what hadn’t been broken when they decided to attend the same college. 

When Ronan saw Adam Parrish standing in the doorway of Monmouth, however, he suddenly and immediately decided that it was, in fact, very  _ very  _ fucking broken. 

“The hell, Dick?” he growled. 

“Just invited Parrish over for a bit of studying, is all,” Gansey replied. Completely unperturbed. Ronan wanted to throw something. “Don’t worry, you don’t need to sit with us while we discuss Einstein's most recent publication. Unless, of course--”

“ _ Fuck  _ no.” 

He slammed his door and didn’t come out until the following afternoon. 

#####

Apparently, these little “visit” from Parrish were to be a  _ thing.  _ Gansey argued it was simply common courtesy to extend hospitality to a fellow Aglionbian. Ronan believe this was a new and completely uncalled for attempt to turn Ronan in an upstanding citizen. Because perfect _ Parrish  _ was just so fucking... _ perfect.  _ Of  _ course  _ Ronan could learn a thing or two from Aglionby’s current valedictorian. Of  _ course  _ Gansey would rather his roommate be as into history and philsophy and fucking  _ astrophysics  _ as he was. Of  _ course _ he’d rather this blue-eyed, dirty-blonde-haired, perfect American Boy specimen as his right-hand man than scowly, growly Ronan Lynch. 

Fuck that. 

Whenever Adam appeared on their doorstep, Ronan suddenly remembered a very important appointment with his BMW 328 and a certain piece of Bulgarian garbage on a stretch of Route 29 that was deserted after 9pm. And when Gansey would express his obvious discontentment, Ronan would roll his eyes and flip him the bird and storm out anyways, while Parrish watched aloof and unreactive. 

“Why do you insist on doing this  _ every single time _ , Ronan?” Gansey asked, exasperation clear. Adam hadn’t arrived yet, but they knew he was coming. It was Thursday. He’d taken to making appearances on Thursdays. “He’s a swell guy, if you’d just give him the time of day!” 

Ronan scoffed. “Like your intentions are so fucking pure.”

“What do you mean by  _ that _ ?” 

“You’re just stuck on his girl! Green, or...magenta...whatever the fuck her name is!” 

“It’s Jane,” Gansey said. 

“It’s Blue,” Noah noted. Their third roommate had slipped out of his room and was sitting on the couch with a half-eaten apple. 

“The hell would  _ you  _ know?” Ronan snapped. 

Noah shrugged. “Met her at the dance hall a couple weeks ago. Adam, too.” 

“You went without us?” Gansey said, shoulders sagging. 

“Neither of you dance,” Noah said, matter-of-fact. “I wanted to dance. Blue is, in case you were wondering, a great dance partner.” 

Gansey sighed and pinched the bridge of his nose. “I was  _ not  _ wondering.” 

“Adam’s good, too,” Noah said, raising his pale brows at Ronan this time. 

“I don’t give a shit.” 

Noah shrugged once more, a plea for his innocence, and took another bite of his apple. 

Only an argument could disrupt this new schedule. Apparently, something happened between Gansey and Adam after one of their classes. When Ronan flung open his bedroom door on Thursday, Gansey told him that Parrish wouldn’t be coming, and he looked over the rim of his glasses as if to say  _ so you don’t have to go make terrible decisions tonight.  _

Ronan, whose reputation was founded on being a contradictory asshole, went out anyways. But he just drove to the Barns and laid out in the fields and watched the stars until he fell asleep in the grass. 

But whatever spat had occurred was sanded over and given a fresh coat of paint by the next week. Ronan opened the door, already on his way to see a Bulgarian about a rematch, as Adam’s delicate fist was raised to knock. 

“Oh. Hi,” he said, voice hoarse from the exhaustion painted beneath his eyes and in the hollow of his cheeks. 

Ronan only spoke to Adam in grunts and sneers, and received as much courtesy in return. But even in this small, hostile moments, it became clear that Adam was never as happy off the dance floor as he seemed to be on it. Gaunt face always drawn into something close to a frown, but unable to fully commit. Cheeks sunken and dark shadows beneath his pale eyes. He was always well-dressed; obsessed, it seemed, in keeping his clothing ironed and pressed and free from dirt and dust. Sleeves always buttoned at his wrist, tie always knotted just so, slacks creased as if he’d just pulled them from a store mannequin. 

It wasn’t effortless. Not in the way Gansey’s well-dressed-ness was. Adam was precise, rigid, even, in his clothes. Wearing them as he thought they were meant to be worn. Gansey wore his expensive, tailored attire as if it was all an extension of himself. Natural. Meant to be. 

Ronan didn’t know what to make of that. Except that he needed to  _ stop thinking _ about how well his current enemy No. 1 and his best friend wore their trousers. 

Adam’s hand, still raised in a gently-curled fist ready to knock, was right in front of Ronan’s face. Ronan could kiss the inside of his wrist - where faint yellow rings speckled with bits of brown like an overripe banana peel circled his delicate bones - without having to move more than his neck. Could lick the chapped ridges of his knuckles with a step forward. Could kiss up his arm with two--

Adam glanced at his fist, something uncertain flickering in his gaze before he pulled it back and shoved it into his pocket. 

Ronan’s mood expired and fouled instantly. 

Adam glanced at Ronan, then behind him, then back again. “You headin out?” 

Ronan grunted. 

“Well. Be seein you then, I guess.”

Ronan grunted. 

Adam tilted his head. A marginal shift that changed how the yellow light hit his face and he suddenly looked less like the weight of the world was crushing his shoulders. Like he was a normal Aglionby boy. Like he was still a teenager, even. 

Oddly, Ronan found he missed the other Adam. 

“Are you coming in or what?” Ronan spat. 

Adam straightened his spine once more. “You’re in the way,” he said, matter-of-fact. 

Ronan cursed. He stepped right as Adam stepped left, cursed again, and then made a scene of gesturing Adam into the apartment like a squire presenting a guest to a king. 

He didn’t stick around to watch Adam and Gansey nerd themselves into oblivion. Kavinsky was waiting to have his ass kicked. A large glass of vodka was waiting to erase the past five minutes from memory. 

  
  


#### 

Ronan should have known that, eventually, Dick the Third would grow weary of the undiplomatic way Ronan approached - well,  _ everything,  _ but specifically Adam Parrish. Ronan should have also known that, once Dick grew annoyed, he’d take matters into his own hands. 

“The hell did you just say?” Ronan hissed. 

“Get your tie on straight,” Gansey noted, his tone terse and direct and obviously unwilling to tolerate any of Ronan’s bullshit. “We’re going dancing. Tonight, with Parrish.” 

“Why,” Ronan demanded. 

Gansey closed his eyes. “Because,” he said, as evenly as he possibly could, clearly making an effort not to clench his teeth and growl as Ronan would. “Because it’s Friday. Because we haven’t done anything  _ fun  _ in a while. Because I am tired of watching you run to your demons every time Parrish comes within five feet of you. So we are going to the dance hall, we are going to have a delightful time, and you are going to stop being an ass and start being a gentleman.” 

Ronan glared at the ground and balled his hands into fists and crossed his arms like the properly chastened child he was. But Gansey knew Ronan frighteningly well, and he knew that a Ronan apology was a silent thing. Eyes cast elsewhere. No fighting back. Submission to the alpha. 

Gansey threw a tie at him. Ronan caught it one-handed. “Go get dressed. They’ll be here any moment.” 

Ronan did as he was told, dragging his feet only a little and not slamming his door this time, which was in and of itself a victory. 

Noah was already ready - honestly had most likely been ready for hours - and was bouncing around the apartment like a puppy as Ronan made an attempt to look put together, if not for Gansey’s sake, then to at least see the look on Parrish’s face when he appeared with a tie knotted properly and his shirt tucked in like an agreeable person and not some certifiable pill. 

A knock. “Come in,” Gansey said. 

“Adam!” Noah said. “And Blue!” 

Blue? Gansey hadn’t mentioned that. Ronan nearly tripped coming out of his room just to watch the look on Gansey’s when, sure enough,  _ sure fucking enough _ , the small spiky-haired woman entered behind Adam. Her blue and white polka dot dress looked hand-painted and hand sewn, the hem uneven and sleeves an awkward length. 

First, Gansey looked like he’d seen the ghosts of 1000 men rise from their graves and scream in unison. Then, his cheeks flushed violently red and he struggled to swallow and Ronan wouldn't have been surprised if he combusted right there in front of them all. 

Ronan looked from Blue to Gansey to Adam and back again. Gansey was still gap-mouthed. Adam was silent. Frigid as an ice chest. And Blue, Blue was…

_ Oh.  _ Blue was  _ mad.  _

Whatever was burning her up had clearly happened outside the door. Or maybe on the walk. Or maybe had been festering beneath the surface since the start of them going steady. Who knows. Figuring it out was above Ronan's pay grade. And, to be frank, Ronan didn't give a shit. 

Gansey, never one to let a social gathering sour before it had even began, pulled himself together and said, “well, are we still keen on the dance hall?” 

Gansey glanced at Adam. Adam did  _ not  _ glance at him. 

“Well  _ I  _ didn’t come here just to stand around,” Blue huffed, arms crossed and pink-painted lips jutting in a way she seemed to think was intimidating.

Ronan thought about his car parked downstairs. Thought about Kavinsky’s growling engine and sharp-toothed sneer. Thought about a bottle of whiskey: half in his hand, half in his blood. 

But even Ronan had to admit that  _ this _ , right here - this non-argument between a love triangle that none of the participants realized was a love triangle - would be  _ far  _ too entertaining to miss. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Adam and Blue are dancing to [ "Sing, Sing, Sing" by Benny Goodman](https://open.spotify.com/track/5L8ta4ECl5zeA6bGqY7G38?si=VBMcPPgfTry2WPapNleuLA).


	2. Chapter 2

Adam Parrish was having a shitty day.

He’d been late to almost everything: class, work, getting Blue from Fox Way, meeting at Monmouth. As if being late to the first obligation of the day meant being late to all of them to ensure none felt left out. Maybe the punch to his arm that sent him barreling into the wall of his trailer home had set something off-balance in the universe. Or maybe his aching shoulder slowed down his bike riding.

Or, maybe it was just shit luck. Adam had plenty of that.

Regardless, he was irritated with himself for cutting it too close for both his classes and his shift at the munitions factory outside of town, right beside his crummy little mobile home neighborhood. Then he’d rushed home to change, had encountered his father--not in the bruising way, just in the “you better not be out past curfew, else there’ll be hell to pay, y’hear?” way--which had made him late to Blue’s, and when he arrived--face red, lungs heaving, tie askew, hair windblown beyond help--he must have been holding his aching shoulder some sort of way, because Aunt Persephone told Blue, “be careful with him tonight,” and Blue looked at him with a furrowed brow that quickly turned to understanding and then immediately into anger.

“Again?” she demanded.

Adam wasn’t going to lie to her, because that had been the start of their last enormous row. But that didn’t mean he was required to answer. He also didn’t need to; refusing to look at her told the truth.

“Stay with us,” Blue said, suddenly. Pity carved the lines of her frown, and Adam felt a spark of indignation in his chest.

He narrowed his gaze. “No.”

“Why.”

“Because I’m handling it.”

She looked from his shoulder to the stubborn set of his mouth and back again. “_Handling_ it? There’s nothing to handle! This isn’t a situation that can be controlled. He’s a monster, Adam, you need to leave.”

The fire caught. Turned every feeling - shame, hurt, defiance, pride - into rage, flames licking at his tongue and the curl of his fist.

“You’ll be late again, Adam,” Persephone said, voice floating down the hall from the kitchen like a cloud. Adam closed his eyes, counted to ten, let the smell of Persephone’s perfume and macerated peaches and sugar-coated pie crust baking in the oven calm him.

“Let’s go,” he told Blue. She was rearing for a fight, he could see it in her eyes, and she would follow him just to have words if nothing else.

“Do you know what he could do to you?” she said, taking two steps for every one of Adam’s, nearly grapevining just to keep her eyes on his. “Today it’s the shoulder, tomorrow it’s a broken bone, and then he’s gonna do something so bad it can’t be fixed.”

“It’s fine, Blue. I have a plan.”

“Just like you had a _plan _to leave right after high school? Just like you had a _plan_ to leave at 16?”

“We went to war.”

“Is the war here? Is my house in a trench?”

“I’m not living with you.”

“Is this some sort of Southern Baptist purity crap you internalized when you were a kid?”

The spark had caught, and was growing into a bonfire. Adam closed his eyes, stalked forward a little faster, tried to breathe. Blue stomped forward and jumped in his path.

“The only thing standing in your way right now is you,” Blue said, hands on her hips, stance wide, voice like the crack of a whip. “You have options. Plenty of them. You’re the one choosing to not take any of them.”

He snapped. “Because this is my shit, Blue,” he yelled. “I’m not going to go from one fucking house where I owe them my life to another one.”

The best thing about Blue Sargent: when faced with the snarling, fiery beast Adam inherited from the monstrous Parrish bloodline, she never backed down. Never flinched away. Never took his shit.

“Who the hell said anything about owing?!”

“I’m not going to owe anyone anything. My terms, or not at all.”

“Jesus Christ, Adam, this isn’t a-a- a...taxable--” She threw her hands up. “I don’t know! _Whatever_! Listen, we are not going to charge you interest for living with us. You could pay rent to my mom, you could do housework for them, like, gardening, or, or...something--if it really matters that much to you.”

“That’s exactly the problem!” Adam shouted.

“Why! Why is this a problem?!”

A squad car honked. It pulled up to the side of the road, the copper in the passenger’s seat shining a flashlight on the two of them.

“This boy givin’ you trouble, miss?” he asked, Henrietta drawl digging through the gravel of his voice. 

“No,” Blue snapped, daring them to contradict.

He focused the light on Adam.

Adam shoved his hands in his pockets and squinted against the light.

“Consider this a warnin. Take a hike, before we charge y'all with loiterin.”

The car pulled off. All the fire left in Adam extinguished with a single exhale. “Gansey’s waiting for us,” he muttered. “Let’s just go.”

But Blue stepped closer, and poked his finger in the middle of his chest. “Just know this, Adam Parrish. You spend so much time pushing everyone’s help away, and one day you’ll look around and realize you’ve done nothing except make yourself sad and lonely.” 

With a huff of finality, she turned on his heels and strode in front of him with her chin held high. Adam rubbed his sternum. He could still feel the push of her finger.

“Gansey’s waiting,” Blue sang sharply from up ahead.

Adam sighed. She wasn’t done fighting about this. He could see it in her eyes, in her swagger up ahead. He wasn’t, either.

But they had a dance floor to sweep. 

####

Correction: the Blue who never backed down was _one _of his favorites. The other: Blue on the dance floor.

There was so much energy packed into her tiny five-foot frame. She knew all the steps, all the tricks, could improvise with ease, followed with incredible grace, could lead like a pro if she wanted to, too. Adam was used to their push and pull on the dance floor, accustomed to her weight and the speed of her footwork and her unique flourishes and flairs on every traditional step and well-known pattern.

Blue danced how she lived: loud, determined, and without reservation.

Tonight, however, she was mad. At Adam. And if Blue poured every emotion into every dance on a good day - filling the space between them with joy and life and laughter - she did the same on the bad.

Every movement was stiff, their line of tension tight and irritated. She stomped her feet more than she needed to, tried to snap their tension in half instead of flowing through the push and pull. Kept missing his cues, kept resisting his lead. He would twirl her into a lift and she’d push herself away again, instead.

They looked like a couple of cement mixers. It was embarrassing.

His shoulder hurt.

They left the floor, a foot apart, before the brass cut their final note: Blue to the bar, Adam to the table with the others. He slipped quietly into his seat, thankful that Gansey was still swarmed with Aglionby boys with his back to the dance floor; that Ronan was in a perpetual state of not giving a fuck and was currently seeing how long he could hold his finger in the flame of his lighter before it burned; that Noah was busy chatting with another table of classmates and their dates. 

Adam had only seen Noah at Monmouth, never in classes or around campus. Gansey explained it all, late one night, when Noah had gone off with Ronan. That Noah had been a third year at Aglionby College during Pearl Harbor, a date which will live in infamy. That he had heard through his synagogue, through immigrants, through the radio, precisely what Hitler was doing to Jewish people like him overseas. That Noah had been one of the first in line at the Henrietta recruitment office the eve of America’s declaration of war on Japan. That he hadn’t wanted to fight but knew he could translate Czech, could interpret and decode messages from the occupied states.

Noah was placed in Strategic Service. He made a friend during basic training: a Barrington Whelk.

Three months into service, Whelk tried to kill him. Lured him out of their bunk after curfew and tried to bash his skull in with the butt of his standard-issue rifle.

Adam had thought the shadowy smudge along the edge of his eye socket and cheek bone was a pesky bit of graphite or pen ink. Perils of leaning your cheek on your hand during lecture.

It was most certainly not.

They had no idea what caused the sudden bloodlust in Whelk. Why he did it. What purpose it served.

The guard on patrol that night was new. Took the wrong patrol route on accident. Stumbled upon Whelk: eyes crazed, sweat dripping down his chin, the butt of his rifle dripping with blood.

Noah was, somehow, miraculously, alive.

He was honorably discharged. Spent months in recovery. Aglionby allowed him to return to school. He failed his first semester back, decided it would be best for his health to restart from the beginning. A clean slate. Aglionby agreed.

Apparently, Noah and Gansey had met during some sort of social for incoming freshmen. A discussion of housing, of the old factory downtown that Gansey was spending all summer renovating, of the third room in the factory that needed a resident. The rest was history.

Blue returned from the bar with her French 75 half drunk along the way. She sat next to Gansey, across from Adam. She refused to meet his gaze.

A beer clanked in front of him, condensation splattering the table cloth and his cheek. He turned. Ronan threw himself back into his seat.

“Get the next round,” Ronan told him, balancing what looked like whiskey on the rocks. He lit a cigarette and leaned his chair back so he could prop his shoes on the table.

Adam took a swig of his beer. It was cheap. And based on how Ronan grimaced with a gulp of his own, Adam bet he’d bought the cheap whiskey this time, too.

The corner of his mouth quirked, without his permission. He focused on peeling the label off the beer bottle.

“Haven’t seen you out on the floor yet,” Adam noted.

Ronan snorted. Smoke poured from his nostrils. “Don’t have a reason to be.”

“Because you’re a shitty dancer?”

“I’m a prodigy,” Ronan snarled.

Adam laughed.

“That so hard to believe? I don’t dance so others can feel better about their deaf hoofin’.”

“That so?” Adam stared him down. “Don’t think you’re the humble type.”

Ronan let the chair fall back onto all fours with a bang. “And what type do you think I am?” he growled.

Adam gave him an appraising look. “The type to sweep the floors if you thought you could.”

Ronan stared him down, all hard edges and a dangerous glare. Adam stared back.

Ronan broke first, snarl turned to a razor sharp smile. He took a long draw from his smoke and shoved the butt into Adam’s half-finished beer. “Big talk from someone who’s partner just left them hanging out to dry.”

Adam’s brow furrowed. He turned. Blue was missing. Noah, too.

While he and Ronan had been--not really talking, because that suggested some sort of minimally cordial back-and-forth which was...not what was happening, the band had slowed down, all gentle piano and the steady hiss of the hi-hat as the singer cradled the microphone in a gentle caress and crooned. Out on the floor, Noah and Blue dance, slow and languid, her face buried in his shoulder, his chin resting on top of her pointy hair.

Swing dancing was like those spinning rides at the state fair, the ones that whipped you round corners faster than sin. It was tumbling down a steep hill, barely holding on the control. It was chaos held in the palm of your hands and in the balls of your feet, that single line of follow-lead, push-pull, tension hooked around a finger the only thing keeping the dance from spinning wildly out of control.

Blues dancing was the opposite. It was tight. Contained. Chest to chest, legs slotted between one another, pushing back and forth into one another, always touching, always together. Lip right along the hairline, cheek pressed into shoulder, nosing along the lines of the neck.

Blue never wanted to blues dance. They’d spin and step through song after song, but the moment the trumpet began to wail a languid tune, Blue insisted she needed a drink. Needed a break. Just didn’t want to dance anymore, okay?

There were nights when the band was feeling romantic, when the songs were all as slow as molasses, stretching over the room and winding couples into its embrace on the floor. And still Blue refused.

“But your name is Blue,” Adam would say, every time, as if some sort of logic behind that would get her out of her chair, get her to stop staring at her drink with such a scowl Adam felt sorry for the gin and tonic.

“And your name is Adam, but I’m not condemning you for humanity’s fall from grace, now am I?”

Apparently, Noah was different.

Adam swallowed the impulsive flash of anger, chased it with resentment and jealousy and longing and everything else that boiled his blood. It all settled in his gut, twisted his stomach and soured, making him queasy. He went to take another sip of his beer, remembered the cigarette, put it down and pushed it away with a sour twist of his mouth.

“Where did you and Jane meet, Parrish?” Gansey asked suddenly, turning his gaze away from the dance floor.

“School,” he replied. Tried to even out his tone again. Keep it neutral, state the facts.

Ronan whistled. “High school sweethearts, huh?”

“No. Just friends.”

“What changed? If you don’t mind me asking,” Gansey said.

Adam shrugged. “Always thought she was a dish. Finally got the moxie to send her flowers and ask her out.”

“She’s a catch.”

Noah was stroking his hand up and down his spine. _You’ve done nothing except make yourself sad and lonely. _Adam curled his fist around the white tablecloth.

“She is,” he said.

Ronan rolled his eyes. He threw himself out of his chair as loudly as was possible, and then some. Gansey startled, then adjusted his glasses to look disapprovingly at Ronan. “Bar,” he growled, as if a suitable explanation. “Parrish?”

Right. He owed him a drink. Adam stood with the careful consideration of someone not wanting to be seen or heard.

The song was far from over. He turned his back on Noah and Blue.

_Made yourself sad and lonely. _

Adam knew he wouldn’t be dancing any more tonight. 

####

Adam and Blue were not a perfect pairing. Not that either of them had a superior frame of reference for such things: Blue lived in a house full of women without a father, uncle, or steady boyfriend in sight; Adam lived with the two people whose sole expression of love was the signed piece of paper collecting cobwebs in the basement of City Hall.

Unlike Robert’s complete indifference towards Alice, Adam did genuinely like Blue. _Like _like. Might even love one day. He couldn’t see that future right now, couldn’t necessary imagine what it would be like to love Blue Sargent, but he believed it could happen. Maybe. And if it didn’t—well, he saw plenty of perfectly fine people in perfectly fine relationships. Nothing wrong with that.

He knew Blue felt differently. They’d never had the conversation, had never gotten much farther than Adam’s first confession— “I think you’re awfully pretty”—but he knew. He always seemed to know. Knew when his father was already halfway to rage, knew when his mother was more inclined to tattle on him, knew when Aunt Persephone could keep a secret and when she was more likely to whisper her uncanny observations right as the conversation lulled into silence so everyone would hear it.

He knew Blue wanted feelings as strong and powerful as she was. That feeling _something, maybe, eventually, _was never as good as feeling _everything, always, right now. _He knew that she was approaching the ledge, and he knew that when she had the choice to either leap on her own or wait with Adam to build the bridge forward, she would leap. And she would make it to the other side, landing with maybe the tiniest bit of a wobble but with both feet on the ground, steady enough, and that she would look back with the smallest smile before walking on without him.

Adam cared. Of _course _he did. The knowledge that it would happen did nothing to ease the ache he felt in his chest.

But Adam had his own bridges to build. Bridges that would take him away from the barren wasteland of his trailer park home. Bridges that would lead him to success, to wealth, to the life of nice suits and fancy watches and fine-looking cars that awaited him in a big city. Bridges he needed to burn once he was good and gone of that dusty, infertile hellhole.

#####

Things were weird between him and Blue after their fight. They were still going steady, of course—at least, no one told him they _weren’t—_but she was distant. Didn’t hold his hand anymore. Gave him one-word replies and shrugs instead of answers. They sat in silence in a back corner booth of Nino’s during her breaks, and she no longer let him sip out of her straw when they shared a coke.

He still tried to see her as much as he could—which, to be fair, wasn’t very much given his grueling course load and jobs and curfew. But he still visited her during her breaks when she waitressed at Nino’s; he still swung by Fox Way on Saturday mornings to fix leaky faucets and help Persephone bake pies for the local cake walk fundraisers; and he still took her dancing every Friday night, even if she would rather slow dance with Noah than with him. 

Adam hadn’t _meant _for their sacred Friday night dancing dates to become third, fourth, and fifth wheeled by Gansey, Noah, and Ronan. It just _happened. _The first Friday following his and Blue’s fight, he was twisting out of a kick-ball-change when Gansey’s laugh echoed like a crisp bell tone over the ruckus of saddle shoe stomping and licorice sticks. He stole a glance as he spun Blue out and saw him standing by a table at the edge of the floor, glass of fine scotch in hand as he chatted with his crew teammates. Their eyes met. He waved. Blue let go of Adam’s hand to wave back.

“Do you and Jane go to the dance hall every Friday?” Gansey asked Adam before the start of their history lecture on Monday.

“We try to. Hard sometimes with work, but most weeks I have it off.”

Gansey nodded. “Would it be too much of an imposition to suggest we go together? I had such fun last week, and it’s good for Ronan to—”

“What’s good for me?”

Speak of the devil. Lynch dropped himself into the desk behind them.

“Socializing with less degenerate individuals,” Gansey replied.

_“Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu.”_

_“Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur,_” Adam said, turning around with a quirk of his brow. Ronan sneered. He pushed Adam’s chair with his foot, angling him back towards the front of the room.

Professor Mallory began to drone. Ronan continued to kick Adam’s chair. Not hard enough to make a sound, but enough that Adam’s pencil would be knocked askew mid-word. Adam held his shoulders tight and rigid. Do not react, do not engage. Ronan eventually dozed off, snoring softly behind them, joining the chorus of half the class.

Gansey didn’t ask about the dance hall after class, apparently needing to ask Mallory a few very urgent questions about the day’s lecture on dead Welsh kings possibly entombed in the mountains that sloped along the horizon line right outside their window.

“Parrish,” Ronan said, in lieu of a departing handshake.

“Lynch,” Adam replied, in lieu of a goodbye.

On Thursday, as Adam was leaving Monmouth after their weekly note swap and study session, Gansey shook his hand and asked, “Tomorrow?”

Adam was tired and sore from lifting boxes at the munitions factory that morning and really didn’t understand what Gansey was asking, so he just did as everyone always did with Gansey, which was to just say ‘yes’. Gansey looked like he’d been personally praised by Einstein himself.

It wasn’t until he saw Gansey and Noah and Ronan waiting outside the dance hall that he remembered their aborted conversation: dance hall on Fridays, Ronan’s misappropriation of Seneca phrases, something about dead Welsh kings.

Blue hurried ahead of Adam to say hello.

“Jane!” Gansey exclaimed.

“It’s Daisy,” Ronan corrected.

“It’s Blue,” Noah said, which earned him a smile instead of the stink eye she delivered to the others. She linked elbows with him and headed inside. Adam shook Gansey’s hand, nodded stiffly at Ronan—who replied by blowing a cloud of smoke in his face—and followed Gansey into the hall. 

Blue was already twirling Noah around on the floor, taking the lead in the Lindy Hop. Noah looked delighted. She, too, looked happier than he’d seen her in weeks.

Ice pressed into the back of neck, and he flinched. Ronan stood behind him with a smirk, a beer in one outstretched hand and a whiskey on the rocks in the other.

“Shithead,” he muttered, but took the beer anyways.

“Asshole,” Ronan replied with a smirk sharp as a knife.

Adam let his lips quirk just a bit in reply.

“You gonna cut a rug this week?” Adam asked as they settled at their usual table. Gansey was pulled away by Henry Cheng.

Ronan snorted. “Hell no.” Adam raised a brow. Blush burned across Ronan’s sculpted cheekbones. “Wouldn’t wanna embarrass Czerny & Magenta like that.”

“It’s Blue,” Adam said.

“Whatever.”

Adam rolled his eyes and shook his head, and took a sip of his beer. “Guessing I’m getting the next round?” he said.

Ronan smiled like a shark. “That college education is doin you some good.”

“You missed a Latin test this week,” Adam noted.

“Picked a good day to skip, then.”

“You always skip.”

“It’s always a good day to do it.”

The song changed. Blue pulled Noah out of a dip and swung him around right into the next number. Gansey clapped Henry on the back and went to shake hands with a group of politicians’ sons.

Adam leaned back in his seat. Ronan leaned forward.

“What do you wanna bet that Carruthers will follow Gansey to our table?” Adam said, pointing to where the blonde-haired Chihuahua of a boy was yapping away in Gansey’s left ear.

“Didn’t know you were the gambling type, Parrish.”

Adam shrugged. “I only bet on things I know I’ll win.”

“Well ain’t you cocky. How ‘bout this: I see your bet and raise you one drink on Carruthers coming over and trying to convince you to go on his family’s sailboat this summer.”

“Oh he’s _never _so forward. I bet he’ll talk about how unfair it is that he can’t go overseas this summer because of the war, and _then _he’ll talk about his sailboat.”

Ronan looked at him appraisingly. There was always something sharp and dangerous about him—Adam didn’t think anything could truly, permanently sand down those edges. But there was something softer in his bright blue eyes. Maybe it was a trick of the light, or the warm night, or the half a glass of whiskey he’d downed—whatever it was, it looked good on him.

Adam glanced back to the floor. The song had turned slow. Noah and Blue were nowhere in sight.

Ronan presented his hand. Leather bands whispered against his pale skin. “Deal.”

They shook on it.

A shadow fell across the table, followed by a billowing cloud of gray smoke. Another drink was placed in front of Ronan. He whipped around. Skov stood behind them, sloppily rolled cigarette dangling from his full lips. His eyes flickered across the room and then back to Ronan. Ronan spun back around. Through a clearing in the dancers, Joseph Kavinsky lounged in the shadows across the room. Arms spread wide, an empty seat beside him. Grinning like a ghoul.

Adam looked back to Ronan. The gentleness was gone, all razor edges and venomous scowls. 

He downed the rest of his whiskey, grabbed the new drink, and followed Skov into the shadows.

“Where’s Lynch?” Gansey asked upon his return, without Carruthers in tow.

Adam pointed the neck of the bottle across the floor. Ronan sat beside Kavinsky, whispering in each other’s ear. Adam thought he saw Kavinsky’s tongue flick against Ronan’s earlobe.

Gansey frowned with disapproval.

Adam turned away and took a long swallow of his beer.

“You know Kavinsky?” Gansey asked.

“Who doesn’t.”

“I would…really rather Ronan _not _spend time with him.”

“He’s an adult,” Adam noted. “You can’t keep busting his chops.”

Gansey took Ronan’s seat beside Adam. “Joseph’s involved in unsavory business. If Ronan gets caught up in it—”

“—he comes home soused every other night, Gans. Races cars drunk. He’s already in it. If you’re this bent about it, and he’s still doing it, then there’s nothing more you can do except hope he figures his shit out.”

Gansey rubbed his bottom lip with his thumb. “He feels like my responsibility,” he admitted.

“He’s not.”

“I know, but…”

“He’s not.”

Gansey sighed. “I know.”

Noah and Blue reappeared from the crowds, chatting with the Cheng table, out of breath but laughing at whatever Henry was saying.

“She really is a magnificent dancer,” Gansey said, watching the two of them.

“She is.”

Blue catch his eye. The brightness in her eyes dimmed as she watched him. She looked at Gansey, and he saw the spark flicker back to life. Gansey waved at her. She waved back.

“You’re a lucky man, my friend,” Gansey said, clapping him on the shoulder.

_One day you’ll look around and realize you’ve done nothing except make yourself sad and lonely._

Adam swallowed the lump in his throat. “I am,” he replied.

He excused himself from the table, pardoned himself for intruding on Blue's conversation, and offered her a dance. She agreed.

There were no lifts, or twists, or dips this time. A simple Lindy Hop, both of them wrestling for lead as they twisted on the balls of their feet. 

Blue had crossed the bridge. He could see it in the twist of her lips. The smile that didn't sparkle in her chestnut eyes anymore as he held the line of tension between them. 

Adam would not give her the lead. 

So she cut the lines. 

And as they stood apart, chests heaving, her hands so quick to leave his grip, he watched their bridge collapse into the canyon between them. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _Quam bene vivas refert, non quam diu_ = It is how well you live that matters, not how long
> 
> _Quidquid Latine dictum sit altum videtur _= Whatever is said in Latin seems profound
> 
> Blue & Adam's not-good opening dance is to [ Why Don't You Do Right? ](https://open.spotify.com/track/5tNQFDpeAggd6Brw3pIpjP?si=59wjPp-OQx2pyvzOGpK0Ag)
> 
> Noah & Blue's blues dancing is to [ "Need a Little Sugar in My Bowl" ](https://open.spotify.com/track/4g8n2xeOM9YeYmT79IIx99?si=oIoKYtTxTvGjB2hyx9-QSg)


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember that time I thought I would finish this before CDTH came out? LOL.

Ronan did not attend the history lecture on Monday, having attended the previous week and therefore already too inundated with useless knowledge to find class productive. And he did not go to the philosophy or English seminars on Tuesday, nor his Latin class on Wednesday, because school was stupid and Ronan hated it.

He deigned to attend his math class on Thursday to take a test that the professor said was necessary lest he fail the class. He drew pictures in the geometric shapes and rearranged the greek letters in the equations to spell curse words. He was the first to turn in his exam.

Another class was exiting as Ronan left the hall. Walking towards him, head buried in the comments on an essay just returned, was Parrish. Fine fingers clutching red-marked pages, eyes rimmed in shadows from sleepless nights, dusty hair mussed and curling against the starched collar of his baby blue shirt.

Ronan wanted to take a baseball bat to every pretty glass window in the hallway.

Adam was so focused on the papers in hand that he nearly walked right past Ronan, and Ronan was so close to sending a prayer up to the Lord and promising to reform into a good Catholic boy. But then their shoulders grazed each other in the tiny hallway and Adam flinched and Ronan’s invocation turned into a curse.

“Lynch,” Adam said, breathless. His pupils were large, hands trembling. A startled animal, almost.

And then, in the space of a breath, Adam was…fine. Spine straightened, shoulders back, expression aloof. 

“Parrish,” Ronan replied thornily. He glanced at the essay. 98%, said the red pen scrawled at the top. Then Adam adjusted his grip, just so, and the mark was no longer visible.

“Can you tell Gansey I won’t be able to see him tonight?” And while Ronan knew what he meant, he ground his teeth at the phrasing of it.

“Sure, Parrish. I’m sure our Dick will miss you,” he said loudly, just to be an ass. 

Adam glared at him, a brutal combination of frigid detachment that stung even Ronan. He opened his mouth to snap something back, but then the bell tolled to mark the quarter-hour. Adam narrowed his pale blue gaze at Ronan one last time before hurrying off with a muttered, “Thanks.”

#####

Gansey took this news poorly. _Pouting_, even, when he returned to Monmouth and Ronan relayed the message.

“Oh no, what ever will we do without the Great and Powerful Parrish,” Ronan wailed. 

“Ronan,” Gansey said as a warning. “It _is _unfortunate. I had such a good theory to share with him regarding the Glendower hypothesis. And I had been looking forward to chatting with him about swing dancing. Get some pointers, you know? I suppose it’s just you and I, then, for the night.”

“What a fucking tragedy. How terrible will it be to be stuck here with _me. _Me and all my Not-Parrish-ness. ”

“I’m here, too!” Noah chirped from his bedroom. Neither of them had realized he was home.

Gansey sighed, long-suffering. “That’s not what I meant—”

“No, no, it’s fine, Dick. I’ll scram. I get it.”

Gansey rubbed his temples. “Ronan—”

But Ronan was already out the door.

####

Ronan did not have any classes on campus on Fridays—not like he would have gone to them if he did—except for a practical course in curing a wicked hangover: hanging his head off the side of the bed with a rubbish bin beneath him and moaning, loudly, about how unfair the world was while Noah brought him glasses of water that ended up half down his shirt, half on the floor, and only a sip in his mouth.

The greatest tragedy of not seeing Parrish on Thursday was that they didn’t know if their standing Friday night dancing date was still on. But apparently Gansey “just so happened to run into Jane” at Nino’s restaurant (which Ronan didn’t think he could call a “coincidence” since he knew precisely when Blue worked and was _very fucking intentional about_ going to Nino’s only when she was around) and she confirmed that she would see them at the dance hall on Friday.

By Friday evening, Ronan’s headache had calmed and Gansey had mostly forgiven him for whatever nefarious acts he may have committed while drunk at one in the morning and Noah was more than happy to diffuse the remaining tension by prattling on about all the lifts Blue promised to teach him, except he couldn’t remember any of their names, so he tried instead to act them out and fell on his face more than was strictly necessary. Nothing like a little slap-stick to lighten the mood. By the time they left Monmouth in their oxfords and ties, it was as if Thursday night had never happened.

Blue met them outside, as always, wearing a violet birdcage veil, yellow blouse, and two skirt—one red gingham and one solid burgundy—layered on top of each other. She nodded at them each and then stormed on inside with her chin pointed up, Gansey and Noah hurrying to follow. Ronan dug his hands into his pockets, hunched his shoulders, and lurked down the hall after them.

Their usual table—next to Cheng’s, right by the dance floor—was empty. No Parrish in sight. They settled into their seats: Blue looking more rigid than a two-by-four as the moments ticked by; Gansey peering around the hall looking, Ronan assumed, for the home-cut dusty hair of their missing group member; Noah folding his pocket square into shapes that looked vaguely like zoo animals; Ronan sinking further into the shadows. The band finished their song, paused for applause and to wet their lips before diving right back in.

“Where’s your partner?” Gansey asked as the conductor counted off the tempo.

“He’s sick,” Blue said flatly, and Ronan didn’t quite believe the lie. She crossed her arms forcefully. “And also, he’s not my partner.”

“Oh,” Gansey said, mouth rounded in surprise.

Her mouth twisted as if she tasted something sour. “We broke up.”

Ronan sat up a little straighter.

“Oh,” Gansey said again, blinking rapidly. “I’m sorry to hear that.” And credit where credit was due, the man sounded genuine.

“It’s fine. We’re fine. Different paths, all that shit. Noah, want to dance?”

The three boys looked at one another until Blue huffed impatiently and Noah sprung to his feet. She took his wrist and dragged him to the floor.

“Dear me,” Gansey sighed, rubbing his glasses on the end of his shirt. “How unfortunate.”

Ronan snorted. Gansey looked over what would have been the rim of his glasses had they not still been in his hands. He sighed and shook his head. He squinted through his glasses and looked to the dance floor. Blue was spinning Noah around and around and around, the two of them giggling like children.

“Gansey-boy!” Henry Cheng exclaimed, sidecar in one hand and jade cigarette holder in the other. He sat his drink down on the table to shake Gansey’s hand. “My dear friend, how are you on this fine spring evening? I see you’ve managed to drag the old egg outta the slammer. He paying room and board there, yet?” He pointed his unlit cigarette at Ronan.

“Fuck you, Cheng,” Ronan spat.

“Lynch,” Gansey admonished.

“No, no, that was well-deserved. The Cognac’s making my tongue loser than a grifter’s. Say, is that our darling Bluebird having a romp with Czerny?”

“It is indeed. Here, Henry, have a seat. What did you think of Malory’s lecture this week?”

“Why Gansey-boy, I thought you’d never ask!”

That sounded like an invitation for Ronan to make tracks to the bar.

He slipped through the crowd, vicious slice of his mouth and sharp brows clearing a path for him. Aglionby boys, soused off hooch, smoked cuban cigars sent in care packages from their fathers, local flirts bumping gums in their laps with limbs made languid from giggle juice.

Ronan wondered if Parrish was okay. Maybe Blue had gotten the dance hall in their divorce. A fucking shame, if that were true.

Ronan would never admit it, but between him and God, he’d come to the dance hall on Saturdays if it meant seeing Parrish cut a rug.

By the time he’d gotten his whiskey on the rocks and made it back to the table, Henry had moved along (he’d thank God for that when kneeling in the St. Agnes pew on Sunday) and Blue and Noah had returned. Panting, red-faced, and smiling, chattering away about something or other.

Gansey looked absolutely smitten. Eyes sparkling as Blue talked, nodding emphatically, smiling every time she laughed.

Correction: Gansey _was _absolutely smitten.

Ronan slipped back into his seat without a word.

The band had taken a break, but were picking their instruments back up again. Blue turned to Gansey, then, and offer him a dance.

Gansey rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m ashamed to admit that I don’t have much, uh, experience when it comes to dancing.”

“So?” Blue shrugged. “I can teach you.”

“She’s teaching me!” Noah said brightly.

Gansey’s brow furrowed. “But who will lead?”

Blue’s gaze could’ve turned him to stone. “Excuse me?” she hissed.

Gansey plodded on. “If you teach me, then we’ll both be followers, and that wouldn’t work. I don’t know much about dancing, but I know there needs to be a lead-”

“And who said I wouldn’t be leading?”

Gansey laughed. “A good joke, Jane, but if we’re serious about these lessons-”

Blue slammed her foot onto Gansey’s toes. He yelped, stumbling back and hopping on one foot with a look of absolute bafflement.

“What on earth was that for?!”

Blue grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and yanked him down to her eye level. “If you’re serious about these lessons, _pal,_” she jammed her finger into his sternum, “you better rethink your biases, or good luck finding some fat-headed broad to follow your dead-hoofing.”

She poked him once more and let him go with one more yank of his collar. She turned on her heels and stormed off to the bar.

“Class-act, Gans,” Ronan snorted.

Gansey tried to fix his collar, eyes still stuck on the spot Blue recently occupied. “I am - what just - what was wrong?”

Ronan rolled his eyes and snuffed out his smoke on the tabletop. “Stop actin like such a fucking abercrombie and maybe she’d go easy on you.”

Gansey rubbed the bottom of his lip with his thumb. “I am right, right? Without a lead—”

“It’s nineteen forty-fucking-three, Dick. Women fly planes, you think they can’t lead a dance?”

Gansey paused. Then his eyes grew wide and his mouth dropped open like a codfish. “Christ,” he groaned. “I’m a moron.”

“Didn’t hear it from me,” Ronan said. Noah snorted.

A voice hissed from the shadows, “someone outta let her know the suffragettes already won.”

Kavinsky approached their table, looking all the more sickly in the yellow glow of the lights. Proko and Swan flanked him on either side. He lit a cigarette held between his yellow teeth, smoke pouring out like tentacles. A demon in the firelight. “Disrespectful bitch.” 

Gansey’s spine snapped straight, shoulders pulled back and eyes locked onto Kavinsky’s goading smile. From befuddled to...terrifying, in an instant. A president—no, a _king, _taking control his court. A chill crept down Ronan’s spine.

Gansey’s eyes narrowed. “What did you say?”

Kavinsky’s smile sharpened to a knifepoint. “You heard me, Dicky Boy. Golddigging scrub like her bustin’ the chops of the likes of you? Do her some good to learn who’s in charge around here.”

“Take a powder, K,” Ronan snapped. Gansey’s hands were curled into fists at his sides. Kavinsky ignored him.

“No need to flip your wig, Dick,” Kavinsky said. He placed a hand on Gansey’s shoulder. “We’re all friends here, just having a gas, amiright?”

Gansey brushed Kavinsky’s hand from his shoulder like the piece of trash it was.

“It’s best you left,” Gansey said, and the command was clear. Even Kavinsky’s cronies paused, uncertain.

Kavinsky’s smile flickered. “Free country, ain’t it? I kinda like this side of the floor.” He slithered up to Gansey until he was a smoke’s length away. “Giving me a new perspective on life.” A clump of ash spilled onto Gansey’s waistcoat.

Ronan jumped up from his seat, grabbed Kavinsky by the collar, and threw him onto the table. Gansey barely blinked.

“He said piss the fuck off, cocksucker,” Ronan growled.

"I know you are but what am I?"

Ronan wound his fist back, ready to break his nose. Gansey grabbed his arm. 

Kavinsky laughed. “Uncle, uncle!” he cried jovially.

“Ronan,” Gansey said, stately through it all. Ronan released Kavinsky. Spit to the side of his shoes.

“Would’ve given me what I deserve without daddy dearest watching, wouldn’t you?” Kavinsky said, gnashing his teeth. He stood up with a groaned and smoothed out his shirt. Cracked his neck and rolled his shoulders. “Nothing but his bitch.”

“Fuck _off, _K.”

“What’s the magic word?”

“Rot in hell.”

“Close enough. See you on the streets fuckweasel.” He flipped them the bird and slipped back into the shadows.

The band had started playing again. Blue returned with a drink in hand. “You hear that yelling?” she said. “Assholes making trouble—”

She looked at the tablecloth. Stained with spilled drinks. Glass broken on the floor. She quirked a brow. “You were the assholes,” she said.

“Kavinsky was the asshole,” Noah corrected.

“No surprises there,” Blue said. She downed her drink. “Everyone in this gin mill is soused.”

“I think it’s time to turn in for the night,” Gansey said.

Blue nodded, downed her entire drink in one long pull, and led the way to the door.

####

Adam was not in class on Monday. 

Ronan had appeared on campus to turn in a mandatory assignment for his English seminar—8 pages, hand-written, on Spenser’s T_he_ _Faerie Queene_, in which Ronan argued that the unfinished five and a half books were most likely the earliest drafts of _War of the Worlds _which H.G. Wells found, edited, and published under his own name because fuck that other guy—for as long as he submitted it he could not receive a zero. Gansey found him beneath one of the ancient oak trees, the one whose roots curled through the quad and tripped unsuspecting boys. Ronan liked to watch and laugh at their misfortune. 

“Gosh, I hope he’s not still ill,” Gansey clucked as he sat down on a root beside him. It was hot. The first truly warm day of the year. All the boys in the courtyard had their jackets off and ties loosened, sleeves rolled up as they lay in the sun with stalks of grass between their teeth. Ronan looked as he always did, albeit more bitter; testing the limits of the Aglionby dress code was only fun for Ronan if he were the only one doing it.

“Adam’s a big boy, Gans. He can take care of himself,” Ronan muttered, eyes shut but scowling nonetheless.

“I just hope something hasn’t happened to him.”

“What, like he’s dead in a ditch somewhere?”

Gansey huffed. “Anything is possible.”

Ronan cracked open one eye, just to glare him. Sun streamed through the blossoming branches of the tree, Gansey’s glorious, princely figure encased in a halo of golden light. Ronan wanted to kick someone's teeth in. “Parrish is even more boring than you, Dick. Like he’d do anything to get himself put in a ditch.”

Gansey opened his mouth to say something, thought better, and merely sighed. “I have his assignments. If we knew where he might be.”

“Bet Cerulean would know.”

“It’s Jane,” Gansey noted.

Ronan snorted. “Keep calling her that, and she’s going to kick your ass into next week.” He paused for a moment, watching as a first year spilled an armful of books as his foot caught on a particularly gnarled root. “If I were a betting man, I’d place all my money on her in that fight.”

“I would too,” Gansey said softly, with adoration.

#####

Blue did, in fact, know where Adam might be. It just took a little bit of pushing to get her to say.

“He works three jobs. Any one of those is a good bet,” she said, sipping a chocolate shake that they both knew was a bribe. 

“He’s probably still not feeling well,” she added. It was enough of an afterthought that it was probably still a lie. 

“I’ll take my chances,” Ronan said, slapped a Lincoln on the table, and stormed out. 

#####

Boyd’s Auto Shop was a small building that looked as if it had carried its concrete walls and carports to the edge of town, sat its girth down for a rest, and never got back up. Ronan wasn’t sure how it had managed to survive the Great Depression—how _anything _in this town survived—but still it stood, sagged and rusted and colored the same sepia brown as the dirt all around it.

If Gansey were the one making this house call, he would just show up. No appointment, nothing that needed fixing, and would expect that Adam would be able to stop whatever he was doing and just…sit down for tea and crumpets and a nice little chat.

Ronan, however, did not have his head up his ass. So he did as anyone would: slashed one of the tires and drove his car to the garage. Romantic.

Adam was the only worker there, bent over a jalopy in his coveralls. It was midday; the sun was harsh and violent. Sweat dripped down Adam’s neck, skin growing red in the sun.

“What’s with you?” Ronan demanded as he walked over to the car. “Dick’s worried you flew the coop or some shit.”

Adam paused his work, but didn’t move. “What do you want?”

“Hello to you too, shithead. My tire’s busted. Need a mechanic.”

He watched as Adam’s back curved and caved with a deep breath. Then Adam righted himself and turned.

Ronan’s mouth went slack.

A bruise. Mottled yellow and green, spreading like a fungus down his cheek. Another patch curved along his jawline. A red gash, rusted shut with a scab, curved across his nose. All of it was healing, which meant it was far uglier than it must have been when he first got it, probably this weekend, probably the day they were supposed to be dancing.

The bruise hid his gorgeous freckles and that, for some reason, made Ronan even angrier.

“Heard you were sick,” but Ronan already knew it was a lie.

Adam coughed. It was not convincing. “Something like that.”

He held Ronan’s gaze. Daring him to say something. It took a few swallows before Ronan could speak. “There’s a nasty bug going around.”

“Yeah. Nasty, alright.” He tapped the wrench against the baby blue car.

“Any clue where you might’ve picked it up?”

He wanted to take it back the second it left his mouth. Wanted to apologize gruffly, tell Adam that he didn’t give a shit, whatever, it didn’t matter who beat his beautiful face, he couldn’t care less...but that would be a lie. A lie to say he wasn’t curious who could possibly want to deck Adam Parrish. A lie to say he didn’t want to know so he could deck them back.

Adam’s brow furrowed. It was a long, uncomfortable moment before he finally swallowed and closed his eyes and muttered, “home.”

Ronan…

Ronan didn’t…

Ronan didn’t know what to say.

What to feel.

No. He knew what to feel. Rage. Sudden and violent and as blisteringly hot as the sun, curdling in his stomach and constricting his lungs and tightening his jaw.

He wanted to throw a punch. To break a table full of glass. To set the town on fire. To shatter windows with a machine gun. He wanted to rip everything apart into a thousand tiny pieces that no one would be able to fix because how could anyone fix this.

“Why?” Ronan finally spit.

Adam shrugged. “Looked at my dinner funny,” he said, as if that was a perfectly acceptable reason.

“Fucking Christ--” Ronan bit his tongue. Rubbed a hand over his head again and again and again. “Who else knows?”

Adam huffed. “What does it matter?”

“Jesus, Parrish.” And Ronan couldn’t say anything else. Nothing that he wouldn’t regret in the morning. “Gansey knows?”

Adam sighed. “He wants me to come live in Monmouth.”

Ronan froze. He choked out, “And?”

Adam glared at a pebble by his shoe. “I said no.”

Ronan exhaled. Rubbed a hand against the back of his head until it hurt. “I used to box,” he said, suddenly.

Adam quirked a brow.

“If you wanted—it might—”

“No,” Adam said.

Ronan bristled. “Why the hell not?”

“Because I’m dealing with it.”

Ronan looked at the bruise with his sharp brow raised. Adam rolled his eyes. “I’ll have enough money to move into the dorms by fall.”

“The dorms are shit, Parrish, come on.”

“Better shit than where I am now.”

Ronan inhaled to argue, but exhaled without comment instead. He shoved his hands in his pockets.

“Heard you dumped your girlfriend,” he said, which was as close to an expression of sympathy he was willing to give.

Adam snorted. “Really? Last I heard, she dumped me.”

A vicious smile cut Ronan’s face. “No shit, huh. You’re just...battin a fucking thousand today.”

“I know, it’s humiliating,” Adam mumbled, but there was the tiniest quirk of his lips. A smile, slipping through uninvited. “Dumped, bruised, and broke. All in a day’s work.”

Ronan laughed, barking a single “Ha!” into the exposed metal beams of the carport roof. And Adam grinned. Fully, this time. It stretched his bruise in ghastly ways, and blood beaded on his lip when the split pulled open once more. But his eyes. His beautiful, blue eyes. They sparkled with something close to genuine joy. Fleeting, gone in a flash, but Ronan had seen it, and Adam had felt it.

“So,” Adam said, all business. “Who slashed your tire?”

Ronan flushed. “How’d you know it wasn’t a rock or...something.”

“A rock wouldn’t leave a cut like that.” Adam nodded to the obvious rip in the rubber. He wiped his hand on a towel hanging from the pocket of his coveralls.

Ronan mocked him under his breath. Adam rolled his eyes. “Well, whatever it was, it’s not going to be an easy fix.”

“Just put a new one on there. What’s the problem?”

Adam raised a brow. “There are no ‘new’ ones.”

“The hell do you mean?”

Adam looked to the ceiling, shaking his head with a fatalistic chuckle. “Rubber ration, you asshole. No new tires. Have you been paying attention to anything? At all?”

Ronan stared at him.

“I bet you don’t know there’s a gasoline ration, either.”

He didn’t.

“Christ. Look. I can’t get you a new tire but as long as the tear’s not too bad--”

“I’ll find a tire.”

This time, Adam paused. “What? How?”

“I just will, okay? I’m not driving around with a limp wheel. I have races to win.”

“Yes, because your racing is much more important than the war effort.”

“Don’t give me that shit, Parrish. If you cared about the fucking ‘war effort’ you’d be out in the trenches right now.”

And just like that, his expression shuttered. Vault closed. Blast doors shut. Everything locked up tight.

Was it to protect him from the outside? Or protect those outside from whatever lurked within? Ronan hadn’t figured it out yet. Regardless, he’d fucked up.

“Get me a tire, and I can fix it in an hour,” Adam said, words like ice, face unreadable.

“Fine,” Ronan spat.

“Fine.”

“Good.”

“Great.”

Ronan glared at him, as fiercely as he could. Adam’s frigid gaze didn’t crack.

Ronan turned on his heels and stormed off. Stomped down the road, kicking gravel and stomping in every puddle and occasionally ripping weeds from the sidewalk cracks just to throw them against stop signs.

It was only once he’d reached the Monmouth parking lot that he realized - he’d promised Parrish a tire. A tire, rationed to hell and back and not available via any reputable means. A tire he’d have to go to the black market to find.

There was only one person he knew with a reliable grip on the black market’s pulse.

And Kavinksy didn’t work for cheap.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> No songs to recc that are tied to this chapter, but if you're looking for some tunes, listen to the [Cuphead soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/album/3jQ7eqotwovipeZ3j3rMqu?si=6bN40V2tRE-nFKaNwLivxQ). It's a swinging good time. 
> 
> Also, _ I'm _ having a blast incorporating authentic time period slang, and won't stop anytime soon. If a glossary of slang terms each chapter is a thing people want, I can do that.


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HAPPY 2020 here have an update

Niall Lynch dealt in suspicious things, with suspicious people, in suspicious places; and he made a lot of money doing it.

The Great Depression did no one any favors, but the Lynches were untouched by financial insecurity. Tucked away in the woods, where most of their “neighbors” (if you can call people who live five and a half miles south of your property neighbors) used outhouses and lit oil lamps and cooked over fire no matter the state of the national economy, the Lynches seemed to escape the aftershocks of the stock market crash. Niall’s pockets stayed deep, his family well-fed, his gardens well-kept and his house well-maintained.

Niall Lynch chose to fill up on gravy when most didn’t even have a stove to cook on. It should not have been a surprise that he had enemies. 

But Ronan was young. Enamored with the cunning, clever, sweet-talking man that taught him how to drive and how to drink proper Irish whiskey and how to land a good left hook and how to smell bullshit from a mile away. Niall was never sick. Never hurt. Never got so much as a paper cut. Ronan thought him to be immortal.

Until he found the body.

“Can you boys think of any reason why some joe would’ve sent a triggerman for your pops?” the coppers asked. Niall’s body lay beneath a bedsheet in the driveway. Feet, legs, torso, shoulders, neck, then…nothing.

There was no obvious evidence that it was the mafia. There was no obvious evidence that it wasn’t, either.

Before Aurora slipped away from them—resigning herself to a life in care home—Declan asked her, over and over, in one thousand different ways, if she knew anything. If she had any records, any evidence, any suspicious that his secret, lucrative work was tied to the Irish mafia. Any mafia, for that matter. If she knew what Niall had hid from them. If she knew what might have gotten his brains beaten out of him in the driveway of their safe haven.

She didn’t. Because Niall had very intentionally selected the finest lass in all of Belfast that would never, ever questioned him.

Declan spent months trying to find an answer. Searching for clues. Digging for dirt. Following leads until they hit dead ends and then starting all over again. Desperate for a sign that Niall had been the only target. That the killer wouldn’t be back to finish what he’d started.

He stored a pistol under his bed, just in case. He hid a shotgun in the frame of the couch, just in case. Left a baseball bat by the door, installed new locks and deadbolts on all the doors, cleared a space to hid in the attic, hid a ladder on the roof. Just in case, just in case.

No one ever came.

#####

Declan would never be so crass as to start a fight with Ronan on the consecrated ground of their local Catholic parish, especially not during Sunday mass. In the parking lot of a restaurant after the service, however…

“What the _fuck _are you doing hanging around Kavinsky?”

He held Ronan against the car with his forearm—not hard, not with any real force. Ronan snarled like a trapped animal, lip curled into a ferocious sneer that would have cut anyone with thinner skin. Matthew had been sent inside to get a table; partly because Declan was efficient, mostly because he didn’t want Matthew involved.

“Why, Ronan?” Declan snapped.

“I like his car,” Ronan said, mulish.

Declan scoffed; Ronan found Jaguars as palatable as barbecued rubber. “I’m being serious, dickhead.”

He pushed Declan’s arm away. “I am, too. Mind your fucking beeswax.”

“Is this your newest attempt to burn me the fuck up? Is that was this is? Because it’s fucking working. I’d rather you get behind the wheel with half a handle of Jameson in you blood than hear from fucking _Tad Carruthers_ you’ve been palling around with Kavinsky at the dance hall—_don’t_ give me that fucking face, do you have even the slightest fucking clue what he’s involved in? What he could do to you?”

Ronan glared at him. “I’m not a fucking dip,” he grunted, but it held no weight.

Declan leaned in close. “I don’t know what he’s giving you, or what he has on you, but whatever it is, you need to make your fucking peace with it and get away from him, else you’re going to find yourself in the back of a squad car.”

“What’s with you?” Ronan snapped. “So what if we’re having a gas? So fucking what? Why the fuck am I behind the 8 ball for it?”

He stepped until he was chest-to-chest with Ronan, and hissed in a whisper sharp as a knife’s edge, “Because he’s the goddamn _mafia, _Ronan!”

And if Ronan’s fangs were dulled against Declan’s armor, Declan’s sword was weak against Ronan’s hide.

“So. What.”

Declan threw his hands into the air, turned on his heels as if to storm away, and then turned back. “Do you _listen_?! The _mafia. _The people who killed dad, who will kill _you, _who would kill _us_.” He gestured wildly between them, black tie flailing and greased hair pulling away from its coif. And then he threw an arm to the restaurant door. “They would kill _Matthew._”

In the window of the restaurant, a halo of gold hair sat at a table set for three. Smiling at waitresses. Brow furrowing and tongue stuck out as he read the menu like it was a sacred text. Sipping his root beer float. Waiting patiently. 

And there it was. Soft flesh exposed, an opening between a thrown fist and barbed tongue. Sword driven straight through.

“_That _is why you're ‘behind the fucking 8 ball’ you asshole. Because you’re putting him in danger. You may not give a shit about yourself, or about me, but you give a damn about him. So for the love of God, stop being a twit.”

Declan half expected to be boffed. Knuckles to the nose, a gush of blood, gravel dust staining his suit, a black eye as a souvenir from yet another parking lot brawl. Ronan’s hands clenched and unclenched. His nostrils flared with every sharp inhale, mouth rounded with each forceful exhale.

Instead, Ronan quietly asked, “Dad was killed by the mafia?”

All the anger drained from him, a vein sliced clean with a weapon he hadn’t realized Ronan was holding. He sighed with a weariness meant for someone far older and wiser than he. “I don’t know for certain. But—it’s a strong possibility, yes.”

Ronan closed his eyes. “I have to get a tire,” he muttered.

“Okay?”

“I need K’s help.”

Declan ran a hand through his hair, smoothing the dark curls once more. He adjusted his tie. Stood up straight, and looked down at his younger brother. “Matthew’s waiting,” he said, contemptuously, and strode past him. A few steps past the car, he paused, and said, over his shoulder, “I give a damn about you, too, shithead.”

And then walked into the restaurant alone.

#####

“Well look who drag himself outta the depths of hell, boys!” Kavinsky’s voice echoed across the field.

His goons jeered from around the bonfire. The towering pile of wood—ripped from the crumbling barn a few yards away—and rubbish belched black smoke and ash into the warm summer night. Skov and the others passed around swigs of moonshine in unmarked flasks; they draped their arms over girls they’d coaxed into the field with the promise of rebellion and risk; they traded drugs to boys with daddy’s gold coin in their back pockets.

These little shindigs went by many names: barn raisers, field blowers, clam-bakes, ring-a-dingers. Listen to the whispers of the Aglionby boys, to the shadows in the dance hall; if you knew the slang, the romps were easy to catch wind of. No formal invite needed. Only some cabbage for coke and a stomach for liquor so strong it could metal a tank right off the wheels. A nice set of tits was a bonus.

And at the center of it all: Kavinsky. The star. Ringleader, creator, Alpha and Omega of this hellish nightmare.

He stood on his souped-up car with a foot on each fender, legs stretched over the hood and arms spread wide in welcome. Fiery tongues dyed the white SS Jaguar 100 violent red. A warning: Stop. Do Not Enter. Proceed At Your Own Risk.

The best thing—the _smart _thing—to do in regards to Joseph Kavinsky was stay out of sight, and out of his way. Being his ally was just as dangerous as being his enemy.

Good thing Ronan had never been particularly smart. 

“To what do I owe the pleasure,” Kavinsky proclaimed. Sharp shadows cut his features like a knife. Carving out a demon where a boy had been.

“I need something,” Ronan said.

Kavinsky made a knowing, lewd sound. He jumped off the car and sauntered over. Ronan hands curled into fists in his pockets.

Kavinsky hooked his fingers through Ronan’s belt loops and pulled their hips together. “I can give you whatever you want, dollface,” he said. His tongue flicked like a snake’s by Ronan’s ear. “Finally get tired of sucking off boys? Looking for a man, now, huh?”

Ronan growled and shoved him away. “No, you fucker. I need a tire.”

Kavinsky paused. “A tire?”

Ronan did not repeat himself. Kavinsky smiled. All teeth, no warmth.

“Well, well, well. No wonder you’ve been missing our nightly rides. Shouldn’t’ve fucked you so hard, huh? Guess it ain’t a surprise you broke the rubber.”

Ronan rolled his eyes and spit on the ground. “Just tell me where to get one.”

“Nu-uh-uh.” Kavinsky wagged a finger. “I can’t just give away all my secrets for free. I’ve got a business to run. A reputation to uphold. I suppose we could strike up a deal, however. I scratch your back, you scratch mine?”

“How much?”

“A tire’s a lotta work, my friend. What with that rubber ration. There’s a cheaper way to get it, if you know what I mean.”

“How. Much.”

“I ain’t talking about bucks, Lynch. I’m talking about _you _and _me._”

He grabbed Ronan’s collar. Lowered his voice to a whisper; this was just between them.

“I know you play for the other team, Lynch,” Kavinsky hissed. “And I know Dick Three ain’t giving you anything I couldn’t. Hell, I bet he ain’t giving you shit, not with how his collar’s buttoned to the neck. You spend some time with me, and I’ll give you _anything _you want. A tire, an engine, a whole damn car. I could give you the whole fucking world.”

Ronan’s brow furrowed. Kavinsky’s pupils were blown out as wide as could be. Powder lingered at the corner of one nostril. “I don’t want the world,” he muttered, taking Kavinsky’s had and ripping it from his shirt. “It’s a fucking nightmare.”

Anger flashed across Kavinsky’s face in a tight and vicious sneer, before he began to laugh. “That it is, my friend,” he howled into the sky. “One giant fucking nightmare. But it could be _ours, _Lynch.”

Ronan didn’t say anything. He looked at the flattened grass by his shoes.

Kavinsky huffed. “The tire’ll cost ya $100 bucks,” he said at last. “I can get it in about two weeks.”

“_One hundred_? Are you _shitting _me?” Ronan spat.

Kavinsky shrugged. “Times are tough, sweet cheeks. Daddy’s gotta pay his bills, keep the good times rolling. These little get-togethers require more than a bucket of clams to keep going.”

Ronan grumbled a long string of swears and kicked at the dirt like it had caused him offense. “Fine. Fine! I’ll take it. Slimy motherfucker.”

Kavinsky’s lip twitched towards a snarl, beady eyes narrowing in disappointment. “Half up front, half upon delivery.”

“Sure, whatever.”

Kavinsky ground his teeth into a smile. “Deal.”

They shook on it. Ronan handed over $50. Kavinsky grabbed Ronan’s hand, and pulled him close.

“And if you change your mind about my proposition, you know where to find me,” he crooned, and then bit Ronan’s earlobe.

Ronan flinched. He yanked his hand out of Kavinsky’s drug-loosened grip with a foul and terrible curse.

And then he punched him in the face.

Kavinsky stumbled backward, blood leaking from his nose, and laughed. He laughed, and laughed, and laughed as Ronan stormed away, fist aching, ear stinging, pockets $50 lighter as Swan and Skov hollered obscenities and threats at his back.

Kavinsky’s laugh echoed across the field, crackling like the fire, curling into the shadows that stretched beneath the full moon.

It followed Ronan all the way home.

#####

“You found one?” Adam said, looking genuinely surprised. Ronan liked the look on him; he wondered what else he’d have to say to see it again. 

Adam had been a frequent visitor to Monmouth the past few days, joining Gansey in his quest to set a world record for most hours spent studying subjects he was already proficient in. Finals were approaching, they told him.

Ronan only cared about exams because he would be forced to set foot on Aglionby’s campus every day for a week: a truly harrowing thought.

Ronan had spent too many hours considering how to tell Parrish that the illicit tire had been acquired. How he might answer any question pressing him for further insight and detail. As it happened, all of Ronan’s planning was irrelevant, because the moment he saw Parrish sitting cross-legged on the floor with a pencil between his teeth and fair brows furrowed in concentration and slender fingers tracing sentences in a textbook, he lost all ability to do anything with grace. He stumbled over the threshold, crashed over the western neighborhoods of Gansey’s Henrietta miniature, and then made one hell of a show cursing the town’s stupid placement and stupid cardboard walls and “why can’t you have _normal _fucking hobbies like _journaling _or some shit, _christ.”_

Gansey ignored him, and left his similar mountain of papers and textbooks to go right the trampled cul de sacs.

“You found a tire,” Adam repeated, still in awe.

“I told you I would,” Ronan grunted.

Adam huffed, “I didn’t think you were telling the truth.”

It should have landed like a punch to the gut; if Gansey, or Noah, or Declan, or _anyone_ had said it, it would have. But something in Adam’s earnest tone made Ronan pause. There was a confession hidden in the sincerity of it: he didn’t think Ronan would keep his word not because it was Ronan, but because Ronan was, more generally, a person. A person who, like all other people, made promises they couldn’t keep, or who would offer him something they couldn’t deliver. 

How many oaths had Adam seen broken for him to assume, as default, that any word given was inevitably a lie?

“I never lie,” Ronan said, short and harsh as if the comment had landed as it should have.

Adam looked doubtful—which hurt even more—but did not argue.

“Anyways, the tire should be here at the end of the month. Can the car stay ‘til then?”

“Shouldn’t be a problem.” Adam looked back at his books, scribbled down a few notes, and was quickly absorbed in Gansey’s sudden burst of “AHA!” and proceeding thirty minutes of explanation of this epiphany regarding Owain Glendower’s mythological Appalachian tomb that he’d somehow had while fixing the walls of a duplex.

Ronan retrieved his pet raven from the bedroom, and then draped himself along the couch. He fed crackers to Chainsaw at the perfect angle for crumbs to rain down on Gansey’s head.

“Is that…?” Adam asked.

“She’s housetrained,” Ronan said.

Adam opened his mouth, closed it again, shook his head with a sighs, and then asked Gansey, “how does that theory account for the indigenous people who inhabited this land at the time of Glendower’s burial?”

It was nearly an hour later, at which point Gansey had gone into the kitchen to heat cans of soup for them for dinner, when Adam turned back to Ronan and asked, “how did you manage it?”

“Manage what?”

“The tire.” Chainsaw hopped onto Adam’s shoulder. He sat still as stone for a moment, blinked, and then tentatively stroked her neck. She purred: a traitor.

Ronan shrugged. “I just did.”

Adam rolled his eyes. Ronan was annoyed to find that he very much liked that exasperated expression, too. At least Adam’s look of _you’re an insufferable asshole _was an easy one to make happen. Hell, he’d seen Adam make the same face at Gansey. And Cheng. It took next to nothing.

It was concerning that he knew that.

“We’ve been trying to find tires for months, now,” Adam said. “And you just…_happen _upon one within the week?”

“Yep.”

“How, Lynch?”

“I pulled it out of my fucking dreams, Parrish, _Jesus, _what the hell does it matter?”

“Since I’m the one working on your beloved car, I think I have the right to know where the parts are coming from.”

“Fuck you,” Ronan sneered, because he had nothing better to say.

Adam sighed, long-suffering. Ronan liked that look, too, even more than the exasperation look, but definitely less than the surprised look.

He decided that if he could rank Parrish’s facial expressions, he needed to stop paying so much attention to him.

“Fine. Keep your secrets.”

It was a small mercy that Adam appeared to have more tact than Gansey or Noah, who were both willing to grovel for a sliver of truth about Ronan’s darkest shadows. Ronan didn’t lie—that was true—but he could only evade the truth for so long before the line between falsehood and omission blurred.

He was more than happy to keep his secrets—the tire acquisition, his father’s possible mafia ties, how Adam made his heart flutter and ache—buried deep in a place only he could find.

“Oh,” Adam said suddenly. He dug around in his pockets and then tossed him a ring with a single key. Ronan’s brows knit, a clear proclamation of _what the fuck?_

“I have a motorcycle, at the garage. Been working on it for a few months now. If you need some way of gettin around while your car’s at the shop…”

There were too many things happen in Ronan’s brain right now, pieces of the puzzle of Adam Parrish rearranging, morphing into new shapes—a motorcycle? Working on cars for fun, for _sport_? Parrish cruising on a motorcycle down the dirt roads of the countryside, whipping around switchbacks where the mountain slopes curled into wheat fields--

He cleared his throat. “Where the fuck did you get a motorcycle?”

“Guy brought it in about six months ago. He’d enlisted, and didn’t need the bike anymore—for obvious reason—but he didn’t want to leave it to rust while he was gone. Told Boyd that if someone around the shop wanted to fix her up, it was theirs to keep. If not, he’d come collect it once he got back stateside.”

“You’ve been pedaling around town on that piece of shit bike when all this time you could’ve been using a fucking motorcycle?”

Adam laughed, but there was no joy in it. “You think I could take a motorcycle back to the trailer? Dad would sell that shit as scrap metal in a heartbeat.” His fingers picked idly at a stray thread loosened from old, oriental rug. “I’ve been waiting to use it, until I move out. Once it’s safe.”

Ronan looked at the key in his palm.

“If you don’t want it, it’s fine—”

“You know how to ride?” Ronan asked.

Adam paused. Then nodded.

Ronan tossed him the key. “Show me.”

Adam smiled. “C’mon. It’s out front.”

Ronan followed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would just like to note that I wrote both Declan storing weapons in the Barns AND Adam having a motorcycle BEFORE I read CDTH so I feel some satisfaction about that. 
> 
> SLANG DICTIONARY:  
**triggerman**: hit man  
**a gas**: a good time  
**To bof:** to hit  
**Behind the 8 ball:** in trouble, or to be disliked by someone  
**Dip**: stupid or foolish person  
**bent**: upset or angry  
**cabbage**: money
> 
> Fun facts: $100 in the 1940s equals about $1500 for us.


End file.
